Review: Midway (1976)

As the title suggests, an account of the Battle of Midway in which a small US Navy force is tasked with taking on the much larger Japanese fleet, becoming a pivotal turning point in WWII. Charlton Heston is a Captain whose Navy Lieutenant son (Edward Albert Jr.) is currently dating an American-born Japanese girl currently interned with her parents for security measures. The Japanese are led by Admiral Toshiro Mifune (dubbed by Paul Frees), with Pat Morita and James Shigeta as his subordinates with differing ideas on tactics. Henry Fonda turns up as Mifune’s American counterpart, with Glenn Ford, Robert Mitchum, Robert Webber, Robert Wagner, Cliff Robertson and others playing the various American Navy brass. James Coburn has one scene as a (fictional) Captain, and Hal Holbrook plays a Commander in charge of the Intelligence unit trying to decrypt Japanese Navy codes.

 

A gigantic cast is predominantly wasted in this dramatically inert 1976 WWII movie from Jack Smight (whose best films are “No Way to Treat a Lady” and “Harper”). It’s funny, in an American film that tries to cover too much ground and results in too little character depth, it’s actually the actors playing the Japanese characters who end up coming out on top. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to find them not being portrayed as black-hat villains for a change. James Shigeta is particularly good here as a cautious officer, Pat Morita is rock-solid too, and Toshiro Mifune obviously brings great presence and impenetrable stature (if not his real speaking voice). For the American side, the late Hal Holbrook probably comes off best, with Henry Fonda providing sturdy presence and stature. Charlton Heston’s only problem is that he spends some of his scenes having to act opposite Edward Albert Jr., who most certainly didn’t have his father Eddie’s chops. Albert’s well and truly out of his depth, unfortunately and his soap opera-ish scenes don’t jive with the docudrama vibe of the rest of the film. Say what you will about Heston as an actor, but he’s always a confident and forceful presence on screen, and it just serves to amplify just how ill-equipped Albert is by comparison. Still, although I would’ve preferred Burt Lancaster in Chuck’s part, Heston does what Heston does very capably, and it’s just enough to at least make him one of the few standouts on the American side with Holbrook and Fonda. Heston never takes full command of the film though, and that’s because he can’t. The lack of a true main character here is a major flaw for me. It’s vital to have at least one character for the audience to latch on to and we don’t get that here. The rest of the familiar faces don’t get enough of a look in, with the normally charismatic James Coburn given a particularly useless, colourless one-scene cameo he’s unable to do anything with. He’s one of several who gets saddled with the endless, dramatically uninteresting war strategy talk and jargon. How can you have someone as charismatic and cool as James Coburn and give him a jargon-heavy walk-on role? Robert Wagner, Glenn Ford (who is relegated to mostly reaction shots), and Robert Mitchum are similarly underused, though the latter tries to liven up his one brief moment.

 

The strategy talk is also frankly gobbledygook to me, they could’ve been discussing gridiron strategy for all I know, so the talk isn’t even interesting talk. A little of it would’ve been fine, but two hours of it? Deadening. The best thing here by an absolute landslide is the terrific music score by John Williams (“Jaws”, “Star Wars”, “Superman”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”). The battle scenes are problematic, a combination of newsreel footage and re-used footage from “Tora! Tora! Tora!”. One or two scenes of it is a little exciting, but overall it’s flat, a cheap tactic that really does date the film badly. At times it looks like a colourised 1930s film or something. Remember, the first “Star Wars” movie came out the next year.

 

A disappointing, flat mixture of docudrama and soap opera. Despite an all-star cast, it’s mostly useless except maybe to war strategy buffs. All others will likely be bored and/or confused. James Shigeta is terrific, however. Sprawling but underdone, jargon-heavy screenplay by TV veteran Donald S Sanford (who has written episodes of “Bonanza” and “Perry Mason” among many others).

 

Rating: C-